And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, Again

Lessons in the Art of Pillow Fort Construction

Andrew van Leeuwen, a Seattle architect and blogger, drew traffic with posts about pillow forts. Above, his 15-month-old son, Parker, in a fort.Credit
Stuart Isett for The New York Times

JANET W. FOSTER, a Columbia University architectural historian, is well versed in the nuances of the Dutch-American farmhouse, the slope of a Queen Anne, the hue of a Downingesque cottage.

She’s also done a little design work herself.

Consider Ms. Foster’s drape-drawstring roof, circa 1992. Its signature architectural feature involved tying the drawstring from her drapes to the corner of a blanket. Then she laid the blanket over the edges of walls made of pillows, creating the roof of a pillow fort designed for her two young sons.

“When you pull the cord, the blanket door rises,” Ms. Foster explained. “When it was up, we played ‘day.’ When it was down, we played ‘night.’ ”

And then her voice started to trail off.

“I’m tearing up,” she said. “You never know when you’re going to build your last fort.”

Given that my two children are mere toddlers, I’m not worried yet about the last-fort problem. I’m still working on figuring out how to build a half-decent one, what with my severe deficit in engineering skills. I’m expert in the field of collapse. So I reached out to Ms. Foster and other architectural experts for help with constructing the perfect pillow-and-blanket structure.

But my search for practical counsel unearthed something else, too. I discovered some tears, an enthusiasm I didn’t quite anticipate and, in the end, something unexpected. I won’t look at a pillow fort in quite the same way again.

The Seattle architect and blogger Andrew van Leeuwen stumbled upon the emotional resonance of forts when he wrote a lighthearted posting about them several years ago. Traffic soared.

“It overwhelmed the server, and we had to shut the post down,” he said, laughing.

Memories of my earliest forts are hard to conjure up. I do remember the feelings, though: huddled in a cave made of cushions and sheets with my younger sister, we conspired to figure out how to create windows and doors in our private space. We often brought in a guest — our cat, Frisky — but the scratch marks on our forearms attested to her interest in being excluded.

I’ve also talked to lots of friends and acquaintances about forts, and heard the same warm feelings about an almost universal childhood activity, one often shared with parents. Cost: zero. Rules: few. Comfort of a cave: high. Cleanup: well, there’s that.

But the chief reason for the primal drive to build forts? Simple, the architects said. We all like space that fits us.

“Little kids don’t have permanent control over their spaces,” said Ms. Foster, the associate director for urban planning and historic preservation at Columbia. “They can make a little space. It’s about having their space, taking control of it. Fundamentally, that’s what architecture is all about.”

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Credit
John Kuczala for The New York Times

My own fond memories prompted me to propose building a fort with my son, Milo, about a year ago, when he was approaching 3. He wanted a rocket ship. I pulled the cushion off our love seat and propped it over the top of a chair, creating about a two-foot cave beneath the cushion and the seat.

We huddled inside, my legs dangling out. I pretended to hit a few buttons on the rocket ship’s computerized control panel. Beep, beep, beep, I said.

“Beep, beep, beep,” he repeated. “We’re here. Let’s go!” And off he ran into the other room to the distant planet we had landed upon, me in tow.

The makeshift structure wasn’t quite holding his interest. Was he too young for this game? Or were my skills lacking?

“The first thing you do is test the building materials,” instructed Michael Lepech, 32. He’s an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, an expert in bendable concrete, a winner of sand castle contests and someone who does not build his pillow forts just any which way.

He makes them with his nephews, William, 8, and Andrew, 5, first going around the house gathering materials, separating heavy from light. That way, he said, they can learn about and follow the most basic design principle: heavy stuff on the bottom, the lightest on the top.

“We also get to talk about tension and compression,” he said, though he avoids technical terms. “We talk about pushing and pulling.”

His big innovation is using blankets to wrap two large cushions so that they create a large wall panel that can stand on its edge. In fact, he creates several such panels. Then he uses another blanket or sheet to attach adjoining panels, in effect connecting the walls of the fort.

Professor Lepech impressed his nephews with a tent that reached eight feet high, tall enough for them to stand a toy basketball hoop inside. He added that he focuses on construction, not architecture, since he prefers to let the boys come up with ideas. “I never initiate,” he said. “The last thing I want to do is push my stuff at them.”

It was at this point in the reporting that the misgivings kicked in. Not about my obvious technical deficiencies. About my motivations. Who is this fort-building exercise for, anyway? Our children? Or us?

I got more structural counsel and some armchair psychology from Bob Borson, 44, an architect in Dallas who frequently builds forts with his 7-year-old daughter, Kate.

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Bob Borson, an architect in Dallas, recommends using umbrellas and sheets in forts. Kate, 7, granted him admission.Credit
Allison V. Smith for The New York Times

His tips: Use sheets for the roof, since they’re lighter than blankets. Couches are a great anchor. Pinch the edge of a sheet between the back of the couch and the wall, add pillow walls in front of the couch, and then you can instantly create a roof by pulling the sheet over them. As a bonus, he said, his daughter, sitting on the ground in front of the couch, puts her stuffed animals on its seat. Who doesn’t want more shelf space?

And umbrellas are great, Mr. Borson said, for superfast fort construction. Just throw a sheet or blanket over the top of a big golf umbrella — or two, if you have them — and you’re all set.

Of course, she loves having her own pint-size space, too. She just doesn’t always have the technique down, as when she climbs onto her parents’ bed and tries to stack their pillows into a fort.

“The pillows are too soft — it doesn’t work,” he will advise her in the gentlest way.

For some architects, building forts takes patience. Jody Brown, 43, an architect in Durham, N.C., jokes that his three sons can be demanding.

“They are just like my clients: they’ve got no budget, they’re not willing to wait on design, they want to move in before it’s done, and they only care about their power equipment,” he said, referring to how they insist that the fort accommodate their Wii video game console.

AFTER hearing all the counsel, I was eager to try again with my son, Milo, who is now approaching 4, and his sister, Mirabel, almost 2.

“Sheets,” I said to my wife, explaining that they were lighter than blankets for use in a fort roof. She smiled with genuine appreciation, as if I had shown her how to wash the dinner dishes in half the usual time.

I tucked the sheet into the back of the couch. Milo climbed onto the seat, the sheet tight above him, like a roof. Then he climbed out again. He jumped on top of the sheet, and he and his sister rolled around on the rubble. I’m the I. M. Pei of Collapse.

Time to ask a tiny architect.

My nephew Zachary, 7, is a hard-core fort builder and has specific design ideas. There’s been a fort in his room for the last two months or, as he says, “like every second of my life.”

“The easiest way to do it is with a desk,” he said in a tone that suggested that he was wondering whether his uncle had been born in a cave. “You know the hole where your chair goes? You make a hallway in front of the hole and you climb inside and, voilà, you have a party.”

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Eddie Brown, 5, in a fort at home in Durham, N.C. His father, Jody Brown, an architect, said that his three sons can be demanding about fort construction.Credit
Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times

By party, he means, he crawls into it and reads by himself. And he has very strong ideas about why he does that.

“Because Mel comes into my room and takes my books and whacks me on the knee with them.”

Mel is Melina, his toddler sister, who he said constantly interrupts him. Sometimes, he said, he’ll invite her into the fort, “but not when she’s in that mood.” Not the parents, though.

I heard that elsewhere.

No parents inside, said Benjamin Lopez-Ikeda. He’s now 17, and forts are largely behind him. But until a few years ago, he and his cousins regularly built forts. They hid their Nerf guns inside. They ate chocolate in secret.

They also followed their own architectural muse, rather than asking for advice from his aunt Margaret Ikeda, who along with her husband runs a design and architecture firm in Berkeley, Calif.

“We just did it our way, and our way was the right way, and it always turned out right,” Benjamin said, adding of the adults: “I guess we didn’t need them.”

“We had to be invited in,” said Ms. Ikeda, who would watch from a distance, not too impressed by the outside of the structure. “It looked like one big mess, like a homeless encampment.”

Even so, she developed an appreciation for what it stood for. “It was their home, a home within a home,” she said. “It had to become their thing.”

Ms. Ikeda had studied architecture at Berkeley, so I reached out for fort-building counsel to one of her instructors, Jill Stoner, an author and architect. She told me the fort had to be the children’s to build, not mine to direct — and theirs, too, to let go of. It’s O.K. if it falls down, comes apart, changes, needs rebuilding.

“You’re setting up the notion of impermanence,” she said. “Keep reinforcing the mantra, ‘This is not going to stay here.’ ”

Hmm. Was that message for my kids, or me?

When I interviewed the architects, I heard the hints of melancholy in their voices about connecting with kids in a mutually creative process. We remember the comfort of the fort, the thrill of designing our own space, and we want to design it with our children.

But maybe the experience isn’t about togetherness. Maybe it’s about letting go. Sure, I may have a few months, maybe years, to collaborate. I’ll show them things. I’ll initiate. But then I’ll have to let them have their home inside our home, apart from us.

The pillows and blankets, the sheets and rope, the umbrellas, will belong to them. And the secrets whispered inside.

USE couches, chairs and other big pieces of furniture as the foundation for the fort. Tables create instant roofs; so do the coves of desks. Or pin a sheet between the wall and the couch, and stretch it into the living room to create a tent effect.

Put heavy materials at the bottom. Pillows can be walls, but they create too much instability if they wind up as the roof.

If possible, use blankets for the walls but sheets for the roof. The lighter the top, the more stable the structure.

Blankets can take a ton of tension. Tie them around the knobs or tops of kitchen chairs. Or use twine or even duct tape to secure blankets to wooden protrusions. As one Stanford structural engineer (and veteran fort-builder) noted, “Anyone breaking out of prison will tell you blankets can take tension if you tie them together.”

Secret design weapons: umbrellas and cardboard boxes. Little assembly is required; just stick a blanket or sheet over the top, and you’ve got an extra room.

Shelf space, shelf space, shelf space: Stretch sheets or blankets over the ledges or seats of couches and love seats to create an instant shelf for stuffed animals.

For the more advanced builder, put the structure near an electrical outlet, plug in the TV and the video game console or DVD player. Sure, you’re simulating a cave or fort, but you need not live like a Neanderthal.

Remember, it’s the children’s space, not yours. Tether your sheets and blankets securely, but try not to get too attached yourself.

A version of this article appears in print on April 19, 2012, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, Again. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe